India’s $315B AI Survival Thesis

The Economist published a piece this week examining why AI has not yet disrupted India's IT outsourcing industry, a sector they treat as representative of the global market's exposure to AI displacement. The conclusion: legacy code is messy, clients overestimate AI's readiness, headcount keeps growing, and Nasscom expects its members to post combined revenue north of $315 billion this year. Crisis averted. The analysis is not wrong. But it mistakes a lagging scorecard for a forward indicator. The Brownfield Defense The strongest argument from India's IT executives is the brownfield one. The Economist quotes Atul Soneja, Tech Mahindra's COO, distinguishing between greenfield environments (new systems with clean architecture, where AI excels) and brownfield ones, where legacy code, missing documentation, and interdependent services make AI deployment far harder. His argument, essentially: AI works great on a blank canvas, but enterprise reality is never a blank canvas. Fair enough. Anyon